Will the world’s largest solar energy plant be a one-hit wonder?

The Ivanpah solar energy project (in Nevada, US), developed by BrightSource Energy and operated by NRG Solar, is the largest of its kind.

Solar thermal power plants generate electricity indirectly: Heat from the sun’s rays is collected by sun-facing mirrors (called heliostats) and used to heat a fluid. The steam produced from the heated fluid powers a generator that produces electricity.

Garrett Hering from Greenbiz did a great job summing up the objections one could have to the project. Here are 3 reasons why Ivanpah might be a one hit wonder.

1. Burned birds and other ecological impacts

Land & Water: Ivanpah requires a huge amount of land (3,500 Acres). Although the plant uses air-cooled condensers to reduce water usage by 95% (compared to wet-cooled solar thermal plants), Ivanpah still uses a significant volume of groundwater to wash the project’s 347,000 mirrors regularly. The project developer however claims that a nearby golf course still uses more water than Ivanpah.

Wildlife: Desert tortoises had to be emerged. But the plant is recently in the news bacause birds dying, when flying through the concentrated solar flux, burning feathers and beaks, or crashing into mirrors.

Ivanpah’s contract price is “at or below” 12.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. While this was (probably) cheaper than utility-scale PV projects when the contracts were signed (in 2008), this is no longer the case.

The average price for utility-scale PV dropped from about 21 cents/kWh in 2008 to 11 cents/kWh in 2013, and some contracted prices even known to be at 7 cents.

Given the fact that PV already achieved about 10 times the scale of solar thermal in terms of total deployment, and that price reduction in PV seems to be accelerating, it will be difficult for solar thermal to win the race.